Very few people in Israel, or in the Jewish world more broadly, know the name Marhab ibn al-Harith, known in Islamic tradition as a Jewish warrior of Khaybar. He appears in accounts of the 628 battle of Khaybar, the oasis north of the city of Medina (now located in Saudi Arabia) where Jewish tribes lived in heavily fortified strongholds until they were defeated by the army of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
In those traditions, Marhab is depicted as a powerful Jewish fighter, a commander, and a symbol of resistance. His death at the hands of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad and one of the central figures in Shi’ite Islam, became part of a larger religious memory that endured for centuries.
Khaybar itself was far more than a battlefield. It was a prosperous Jewish oasis, surrounded by date groves, wheat fields, gardens, and fortified compounds built to defend their inhabitants from hostile tribes. Islamic sources describe its gates and fortresses in almost mythical terms, including the famous story that dozens of men could not move one of its doors, while Talib later tore it from its hinges and used it as a shield in battle.
The fall of Khaybar marked a turning point in the relationship between Islam and the Jews. In the centuries that followed, the battle became more than history. It became a symbol.
The chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud, jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya’ud” (Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Muhammad will return) still appears in demonstrations and confrontations involving Jews and Israel. Its purpose is plain. It invokes an old defeat and turns it into a present-day threat.
According to Shi’ite religious memory, Talib’s victory over Marhab became a symbol of divine power, faith, and triumph over the enemy. That story still lives on in sermons, art, songs, and propaganda. It remains part of the emotional and religious vocabulary used against Jews to this day.
Now, nearly 1,400 years after Khaybar, the Jews have struck a historic blow of their own. The killing of the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei carried weight far beyond the removal of a political leader. For many Shi’ites, Khamenei was the highest religious and political authority in the world, the guardian of the Islamic Revolution founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Khamenei leader of hundreds of millions of Shi'ites
For his followers, Khamenei stood above Hassan Nasrallah or other militia chiefs. He was seen as the leader of hundreds of millions of Shi’ites, a figure with religious stature that has no real equivalent in Judaism. Some even believed his authority was tied in a profound way to the hidden Imam, the Mahdi.
That is why the real question begins now. How will Khamenei’s death shape the generations to come? Will it deepen the religious hostility between Shi’ites and Jews? Will it harden memory, sharpen symbolism, and create a new cycle of revenge language, slogans, and myth?
For decades, Jews heard Khaybar invoked as a threat. Today, history has produced a reversal of its own. The question is whether the Shi’ite world will now turn Khamenei’s death into its own version of that memory, and what that will mean for the future of this conflict.
The writer is an orientalist (Middle East scholar), a Lebanon-born lecturer on antisemitism, and a researcher at the Israel Center for Grand Strategy (ICGS).